Here we are, finally, with a new issue of Struggle! The fund-raising campaign was quite successful; you, the readers and writers, came through splendidly with enough help to finance this issue and half of the next one. Well played! And I finally managed to get an issue together. About time!
This issue has two prominent features. One is a series of ten poems by longtime contributor Raymond Nat Turner. Raymond has been on a roll lately, excoriating imperialism and its collaborator, the Black bourgeoisie, with poem after poem filled with sharp wit, striking wordplay and a deep sentiment for the Black masses and the working class in general. Other works of his can be seen on the web site Black Agenda Report. We are very pleased to feature him here.
The other prominent feature of this issue is a series of pieces attacking the oppression of women and especially condemning and exposing the rape culture. Some of these are very vivid; some of them link the rape culture of capitalism to U.S. imperialist aggression, notably in Vietnam. The issue of the enabling and commission of rape has come into focus especially sharply of late in India and Egypt, but it is typical of patriarchal capitalism, including here in the United States, where the Republican Party has blazed an ignominious path of rape-approval. The Democratic Party condemns rape while joining with the Republicans in an austerity campaign that will dehumanize the masses further, sowing the seeds for more rape. And abroad the Democrats simply murder thousands of people, many of them women, with Obama’s deadly drones.
We want to comment on three political issues. The first is Obama and the sequestration. This is a bipartisan (first suggested by Obama in fact) trick to make cuts on the benefits to the poor appear to be inevitable, out of the hands of both capitalist political parties. In the midst of this Obama, the liberal's darling, declares – once again! – his desire to cut Social Security and Medicare. This is the goal he shares with the Republicans. No matter that the wealthy 1-and-a-few-more percent are wallowing in dough robbed from the workers! The Democrats cower before the banks, in lockstep with the Republicans! You Obama fans need to wake up and recognize that we, the workers and the poor, face a two-headed monster of capitalism dedicated to crushing us, and its commander is your darling Barack Obama. Massive struggles are going to emerge against this blatant robbery. The top trade union leaders and the prominent liberals are just as much a part of the capitalist machine as are Boehner, Ryan, Issa and Rush Limbaugh.
The second issue is what it means to be anti-imperialist. Many on the left think it is sufficient to simply oppose everything the U.S. government does in foreign affairs, whether the U.S. is in conflict with the working masses of a victim country, or with an upstart bourgeois dictator in such a country. These people think it is good to side with an upstart tyrant, like Libya’s Ghadafy or Syria’s Assad. But they are the murderers of the workers and poor in their countries! To side with them is to approve their atrocities against the people. This is what we in the Communist Voice Organization (see “Leninism and the Arab Spring” at www.communistvoice.org ) call NON-CLASS ANTI-IMPERIALISM. In fact, because it abandons the masses, it is not anti-imperialism at all; it amounts to siding with the little mafia against the big mafia. Pox on both their houses! Side with the workers and the poor! That is what Lenin and the Communist International in its best days called anti-imperialism, and we should too.
The third issue is the environment. Activism is rising on this, and our great deceiver, President Obama, is expressing “concern” about the issue, after failing to raise it in the debates with Romney, even though Hurricane Sandy placed the issue firmly on the table (along with a whole lot of water). All the measures touted by the green establishment are impotent; they all rely solely on the capitalist market to solve a problem caused by the capitalist market. The market has no brain; it does not plan; that the market will make the best decisions is a fraudulent myth propagated by the neoliberals (which include both the Republicans and the Democrats). Market-environmentalism has accomplished absolutely nothing. CO2 levels are rocketing, along with other environmental atrocities such as fracking, oil pipelines and mountain-top removal in Appalachia. And nuke plants are degenerating, leaking and threatening disasters. The only answer is a mass working-class environmental movement. Only a mass struggle can force the capitalist government to take direct action against the polluters; and only a working-class movement can prevent those measures from becoming simply another way to rob the people by passing along the costs of regulation to the consumer.
For a working-class anti-imperialist movement and a working-class environmental movement!
Fight both of the parties of the rich, the Republicans and the Democrats!
Dare to struggle! <>
Struggle is an anti-establishment, revolutionary literary journal oriented to the working-class struggle. It reaches out to “disgruntled” workers, dissatisfied youth and all the oppressed and abused and supports their fight against the rich capitalist rulers of the U.S. and the planet. It is open to a variety of artistic and literary forms and anti-establishment views. We welcome works with artistic power which rebel against some element of the capitalist power structure or against the entire system itself.
In the Spring-Summer 2013 double issue, vol. 29, #1-2:
Commentary:
Editorial: The new issue and some political problems (sequestration, non-class anti-imperialism, and the need for a working-class environmental movement)
Fiction, including:
Non-fiction:
Poetry, including:
Struggle’s editor is Tim Hall, an activist and Marxist-Leninist st-Leninist since the 1960's. Struggle is a non-profit magazine, produced and distributed by the voluntary labor of a very few people. Struggle welcomes poems, songs, short stories, short plays, line drawings. Manuscripts will be returned if accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. It pays its contributors in copies.
$2 per single-size issue ($3 by mail), $10 for a subscription of four, $12 for four for institutions, $15 for four overseas, free to prisoners. Double issues, which are twice the normal length, cost more. So the current issue, which is a double issue, costs $4 from a vendor. Bulk discounts and back issues (on anti-racism, against the Persian Gulf War, depicting the postal workers’ struggle) are available. Checks or money orders must be made payable to Tim Hall—Special Account.
Struggle’s postal address is now P.O. Box 28536, Joyfield Sta., Detroit, MI 48228-0536,or email Struggle at timhall11@yahoo.com.
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